Dozens are searching in woods for lost boys

RED LAKE, Minn. (AP) — Dozens of trained searchers took to the woods, lakes and air Friday to continue the search for two young brothers who had gone missing two days earlier from the remote Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota.

Alicia White — the mother of Tristan Anthony White, 4, and Avery Lee Stately, 2 — appealed for anyone who knows or has seen anything to come forward.

"They were just playing outside the last time I seen them, just playing outside," she told reporters.

The boys disappeared from a yard in a heavily wooded area in the town of Red Lake. The FBI was trying to determine whether the boys wandered off or foul play was involved. "We don't have any information that would lead us either way," FBI Special Agent Paul McCabe said.

Tristan has a medical condition that requires medication, and he didn't take it Wednesday morning, White said. He "loves water" and had wandered off before, "but we always found him. This is the first time we didn't find him."

Family members said they were preparing for the worst because it's been cold and searchers have found nothing since the boys disappeared Wednesday. Temperatures reached the mid-40s Friday afternoon and were expected to drop below freezing overnight, according to the National Weather Service.

The FBI offered a $20,000 reward for information.

Trained teams searched the heavily wooded reservation Friday. Dive teams equipped with underwater cameras checked lakes and ponds, although McCabe said ground searches had found no breaks in the ice where the boys may have slipped in.

Aircraft, including several small unmanned airplanes equipped with cameras, searched from overhead, while federal, state and local law enforcement officers were on the ground. A rapid-response team of retired law enforcement officers from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children arrived Thursday, McCabe said.

Hundreds of volunteers on foot, horseback and four-wheelers have also combed the forest.

The Red Lake Reservation was in the news less than two years ago, when 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed his grandfather and grandfather's girlfriend on the reservation on March 21, 2005, then went to the high school and killed seven more people, including a teacher and a security guard, before killing himself.